Chapter Text
Yuna knows her son. She knows because it’s her job to know. Ever since that pregnancy test came back positive, Yuna has devoted everything to being a mother. She was one of the unlucky few to have morning sickness all through her pregnancy. Smile, love, her mother said, stroking her hair as she wept on the bathroom floor. This pain is the beginning of so much.
“Mom,” Shane says, and his voice is thick with unshed tears, “I need you to know that I really did try. I tried really hard, but, um… I just can’t help it. And I’m sorry.”
Over the years, Yuna has wished that her son was different. She remembers those moments now, shamefully. Shane, age ten, having a meltdown because she’d replaced his skate laces. Shane, age thirteen, refusing to eat the food that Yuna’s mother-in-law cooked because it didn’t follow the requirements of his sports performance diet. Shane, age eighteen, tearing apart his hotel room searching for the tie he’d picked out specifically for draft day. David had packed an extra, but Shane wanted his tie, and nothing else would do. Shane, age twenty-six, telling his mother that he’s gay without making eye contact.
There are more moments. Moments where Yuna remembered her mother’s words and wondered what that morning sickness was the beginning of, exactly. This pain is the beginning of so much… what? So much exhaustion, since her son was a colicky baby. So much disappointment, as her son turned three without speaking. So much shame, as her son told her in kindergarten that he didn’t want to speak Japanese anymore.
In Yuna’s heart, she knows none of this is Shane’s fault. He is the way he is: colicky and reticent and afraid of his peers.
“You have nothing, nothing to apologize for,” Yuna tells Shane now, his head cradled in her hands. “Look at me,” she says, because she needs Shane to see the look in her eyes as she says her next words. He doesn’t want to look at her. Yuna says it again. “Look at me, Shane.”
He does. His eyes are big and wet.
“I'm sorry that I made you feel like you couldn't tell me.” The words are ash in her mouth. She means them. For the first time, Yuna finds herself wishing that she were different. “I am so, so proud of you,” she says, because that is true. Her son has done it. Proved everyone wrong: the bigoted parents and their bigoted kids on his bantam teams, his grade one teacher who wanted to put him in the special education program.
I think Shane might be autistic, she’d said, and then she’d started talking about things like support needs and creating structured, predictable environments and Yuna’s response was, Don’t tell me what my son is, which was leagues more diplomatic than Fuck you, no he’s not. Hockey was hard enough for Shane already as a half-Asian kid with a Western last name, and she couldn’t imagine how much crueller it would be on him if he was autistic. He couldn’t be autistic. She wouldn’t let him be.
Because sure, Shane didn’t speak until he was four, but then he was speaking in full, deliberate sentences, and it was like nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. No one would ever guess he was a late bloomer unless Yuna told them, and then it was all, Oh, I never would’ve thought.
David’s family always had a passive-aggressive remark for her. So-called friendly advice on how to raise her child. Suggestions. Maybe he just wants to eat normal food, when Yuna expressed frustration with Shane’s restrictive eating habits.
You don’t know my son, she’d seethed internally. No one knows him but me.
Even with David. You know, he’d said one day, after Shane had melted down for the third time that week, sometimes I think that Shane’s teacher might’ve been onto something.
Yuna snapped back something about David not being around enough to know, which she knew would hurt him. Hockey programs weren’t cheap, and David was picking up extra work to help swing it.
David dropped it, just like Yuna knew he would, and Yuna went back to her decades-long campaign of trying to mold her son into something he was not.
“Please forgive me,” Yuna begs, because she knows Shane knows that she wishes he was different.
“I forgive you, Mom,” Shane says, choked up, and Yuna shifts so she’s holding her son in her arms, the two of them crying for each other and for themselves. “I love you,” he says, or maybe she’s the one who says it first, but it doesn’t matter, because the two of them are connecting, really connecting, for the first time in years.